Once Upon a Fastball

by Bob Mitchell

  BKLYN 1000000

  N.Y. 000000

  Bottom of the seventh. Seth knows all the numbers by heart and fills in the final two and a half innings in his mind’s eye:

  BKLYN 100000030

  N.Y. 000000104

  No suspense for him, no emotional buildup. No matter, either, because he is here.

  Seth Stein sits pensively in his little green wooden seat, next to his Papa Sol, on this particular October afternoon, and it is just sinking in. Here he is, watching not a baseball game, but a classic. He is watching it not as a spectator, but as a historian. For this is History, pure and simple. He knows it, knows it in his bones, in his gut. Knows how fortunate he is to be here, seeing the greatest, most important game in the history of American, no, of international sports, of all time, and to be not just seeing it, but to be seeing it in retrospect, in perspective, and in progress, all at once.

  He smiles as he thinks of the old sports apothegm “Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” Because he knows that of all the people in this stadium today, he alone can see clearly into the past, and indeed, in this bottom of the seventh inning, into the future. Because he knows that he is the only human being here, including the 34,320 paid spectators, who has the ability to predict the outcome of this game. Because he knows that through all the ebbs and flows, the highs and lows, the hope and despair, the rallying and falling behind, the silences and roars, the suspended breathing and exhalations of relief, the cheering and jeering, he is the only one here today capable of seeing it all as History.

  It’s almost enough to make you feel giddy.

  The fans are finishing their seventh-inning stretches, hunkering back down to the deadly serious business of rooting, and here come the Dodgers spilling onto the field. They leap out of the visitors’ dugout, all but their tiring fireballer, Don Newcombe, who trudges. They are facing Seth, all nine of them, exposing to him the fronts of their uniforms with the word DODGERS emblazoned on their chests, blue script letters on a gray background, letters only, before they started putting the numbers in red just below. But Seth doesn’t need crib notes or a program: He knows all the numbers by heart. There’s Billy Cox 3 and Pee Wee Reese 1 and Jackie Robinson 42 and Gil Hodges 14, around the horn in the infield. And in the outfield, there’s Andy Pafko 22 (he’ll become 48 next year, but no matter) and Duke Snider 4 and Carl Furillo 6, left to right. And here comes the battery, Newk 36 and Roy Campanella 39, nope, that’s right, Campy’s hurt today, so it’s Rube Walker 10.

  Seth is struck by the whiteness of the players, noting that there are only two African Americans on the Dodgers’ starting nine. Two. Newcombe and Robinson, that’s it. Well, Campy usually catches, but when Newk’s not on the mound, it’d still be two. Matter of fact, now that he thinks of it, the Giants also have only two black starters, Mays and Irvin. How long it took baseball to become an equal opportunity employer. But how long it took all of society to get with the program. After all, it’s only 1951, and America isn’t color-blind and has yet to see the likes of Chuck Berry and Rosa Parks and Althea Gibson and Malcolm X and MLK.

  Hodges is tossing grounders to his infielders, and in the outfield they’re playing catch, and Big Newk is, almost against his will, taking his eight warm-up pitches.

  Seth pans around the ballpark again and drinks it all in, a bee sucking pollen from a jasmine tree. He can feel the zeitgeist: the spirit, the vibration, the nervousness not just of a crowd of people, but of an entire era. All the battle-weary, Commie-fearing, suspicious uptightness of postwar America, of Korean War America, of an America consumed by the rantings of Joe McCarthy the madman and a president in disfavor and the Rosenbergs sentenced to die for espionage and the Russian nuclear test on September 24, a mere nine days ago. By osmosis and instinct, he can feel the collective weltschmerz of it all, the paranoia and the fear.

  He can feel all this, feel it in the marrow of his historian’s bones. Can feel an America searching for heroes in these dire times. They are not finding one in their president, Harry S., the simple man from the Show-Me State who’s an honest, direct, no bullshit kinda guy, the hero and savior of the Big War for dropping the Big One. But now Truman’s in disfavor, what with firing poor old MacArthur, the seventy-one-year-old five-star general, and backing down from McCarthy and now the calls for impeachment and all. And so these fans, every one of them, are looking for someone else to uplift them and give them a reason to cheer, and it sure won’t be Florence Chadwick, who just swam the English Channel to France in an incredible sixteen hours twenty-two minutes, because she’s a woman, don’t you know, and it’s a little too early for that, and Seth alone knows who, today, that hero will be. And he is feeling it all now and tasting History happening and savoring it and smelling it and seeing it unfold before his very eyes and knowing that being here is, well, a whole different ball game.

  “C’mon, you Jints! Let’s get somethin’ started!” Solomon Stein shouts.

  Seth is startled out of his rumination by Papa Sol’s stentorian entreaty. He is happy once again to see his grandfather so near, and so passionate about the game and the team they both love so.

  Under his breath, Sol adds, “I’ll never give up on you guys!”

  This last sentence hits a nerve in Seth. Like you never gave up on us, on me and Grandma Elfie and Sammy and Kate?

  Sol hunkers down as Monte Irvin, the former Negro League star and future Hall of Famer, steps up to the plate. Seth is watching his grandfather settle back into his rooting, passionate, resolute, intense. Seth always admired the passion, but, and this is not a big thing, he is a tad concerned as he watches. There is an edge to this passion of Papa Sol’s that Seth is seeing for the first time, that he is finding mildly disturbing, an inward-directed, smoldering, intense something, gathering there in Sol’s bosom, seething inside and perhaps needing an outlet as he sits there in his little wooden seat, sits and bides his time and watches big Monte dry his sweaty hands with a rosin bag.

  The Giants fans are restless, all but the two Steins in attendance, Solomon sitting there in his tranquil fury and Seth knowing full well that Irvin’s about to slap a double to left past Pafko and the Giants will tie it up, along with everything else that will transpire today.

  Irvin slaps a double to left past Pafko.

  “Dirty nigger!” is the venom a Dodger fan spews at the Giants left fielder from a seat somewhere in the next section over. Seated next to him is a young, droopy-shouldered black man, a Giants fan who dares not object to the racist taunt.

  Seth cringes at the epithet. Not at the virulence of the venom itself, but at the fact that in over a half century, America has made progress in this area, yes, but not nearly enough.

  Irvin takes his lead off second and the lefty first sacker Carroll Walter “Whitey” Lockman strides up to the batter’s box and Solomon Stein sits there, brewing.

  Lockman is up there now, staring Big Newk down, taking big, full counterfeit practice swings but up there for one reason only, to bunt and move Irvin over to third, ninety feet away from tying this thing up.

  “C’mon, Whitey, you c’n do it,” a Giants fan screams, just to Seth’s left.

  “This big ol’ country boy from Podunk, N.C., he’s got shit for brains,” a Dodgers fan within earshot retorts. “An’ on toppa that, he don’t know shit from Shinola.”

  “Oh yeah?” the Jints fan ripostes. “He knows Shinola all right, it’s you who don’t know shit!”

  “I know shit when I see it, buddy,” the Bums backer—no doubt a disgruntled loser years ago in a Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang competition—shoots back, making eye contact, “and I’m starin’ at it right now!”

  Seth takes in the maturity of the exchange, as well as the sweet irony of Whitey sacrificing himself for the good of a black man.

  He takes a deep breath and inhales the mephitic stench of 15,000 cigarettes burning like the Queen Mary’s smokestacks and the acrid odor of stale beer being swilled and spilled by another 15,000 attendees and the pungent aro
ma of mustard slathered on dogs and the saccharine scent of sticky Cracker Jacks and the musky bouquet of My Sin and Chanel No. 5 reeking from the veiled visages of ladies in the crowd.

  His head does a few more camera moves, this time a series of quick cuts from one grandstand section to the next. This place is a mess, a living, breathing, slovenly organism, up here in the nosebleed grandstands, and the aisles are bulging with paper cups of stale beer and cigarette butts and programs and peanut shells and crumpled cigarette packs—Old Golds, Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, Philip Morrises.

  Irvin extends his lead off second and Newk comes to the stretch and Lockman squares around to bunt and the fans are all fidgety and Seth is watching the action with his historian’s eyes but also observing the Polo Grounds, this gorgeous old bathtub of a stadium, which he knows in twelve and a half years—on April 10, 1964, to be exact—will be reduced to a pile of rubble and transformed into an apartment complex, The Polo Grounds Towers, with Willie Mays Field, an asphalt playground with six basketball backboards, sitting right there, smack-dab in the middle of center field.

  Whitey lays down a honey and catcher Walker tries to nail Irvin sliding into third instead of pegging to first for the sure out and the black man is in there safely and Whitey, too. First and third and now Bobby Thomson coming up to try to knock in the tying run.

  As Bobby swings a couple of bats and ambles up to the dish, Seth is struck by the numbing drabness surrounding him. Ladies are wearing the same gray and brown dresses, black and brown veiled hats, an occasional auburn fox stole. Men are decked out in their fedoras, lots of them, all gray and tan and black, relieved only by an occasional sailor under a white sailor hat. And everybody, it seems, is dressed in solid colors: blacks, browns, and grays, sweaters, jackets, and ties, all melding into one another, unbroken by a houndstooth or a herringbone or a paisley or a stripe or a family crest. The pale redundancy of the colors in the crowd contrasts sharply with the action on the field: the brilliant emerald of the outfield and the rich umber humus of the infield and the dazzling, whirling uniforms on the battlefield.

  Fittingly, the day is gray, sixty-degree gray, with the distinct threat of rain hovering like a shroud. The skies are dark, the stadium is dark, the colors in the stands are drab. There is a rawness to the day, and it isn’t just the weather. It is the rawness of emotion, a frisson permeating the atmosphere, the nervous hammering of precisely 34,320 hearts worn on precisely 34,320 sleeves. It is raw out here, and the red and yellow and orange tongues of flame are darting inside every last one of these spectators, the inner fires of hatred and hope. They are all out for blood, one way or another, and it is the blood loyalty of these fans that gives a vitality to the proceedings, the Hatfields-and-McCoys blood loyalty passed on from one generation to the next, the helix of hope and hatred. Papa Sol used to tell Seth how Dodgers fans even hated Halloween, because of the orange-and-black colors of the Giants.

  Seth muses about how the enmity of this rivalry is symptomatic of a thirst, in the America of the early fifties, for polarity. Back then—or right now, as the case may be—the entire complex network of matter in the cosmos, the totality of life and its endless nuances, had in many and profound ways been simplified, reduced, boiled down to the number two. An infinity of binarities. Always two rivals, two combatants, two sides. Us vs. Them. Yanks vs. Commies. White hat (Tex Ritter) vs. black hat (bad guy). Cowboys vs. Indians. Ipana vs. Colgate. Tide vs. Fab. Kellogg’s vs. Post. Ethel Merman vs. Mary Martin. Perry Como vs. Eddie Fisher. Jints vs. Bums. And of the two, only one can be left standing. An America that could make Darwin sit up in his grave and beam with pride.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the official paid attendance for today’s ball game is 34,320,” the PA announcer divulges. A statistic baseball fanatic Seth Stein has known for nearly three decades.

  Thomson lofts a towering fly to center, driving Snider back, far enough to score Irvin from third. Giants fans exhale. Dodgers fans groan. It is 1–1.

  A parched throat and a killer thirst jolt Seth out of his reverie. He waves to the beer vendor, who fortuitously is passing by. He waves again, calls out.

  “Yeah, one beer right here!” Seth says.

  “Hey, getcha beer heah. Getcha cold beer he-ah…”

  “One beer, please—”

  “Hey, getcha cold Pabst Blue Ribbon right he-ah…”

  “I’ll have a Pabst—”

  “Getcha ice-cold brew right heeeeee-ahhhh…”

  Crap. Forgot the guy can’t hear me.

  Newk wriggles out of the inning, and it is the Giants who take the field now for the top of the eighth. Here they come, shooting stars onto the field, a bonfire of bodies ignited by the recent rally. Mo is on their side, largely responsible for the newfound hop in their collective step.

  Seth knows better.

  Here they come toward him, and again Seth prognosticates numbers: Bobby Thomson 23 and Alvin Dark 19 and Eddie Stanky 12 and Whitey Lockman 25, then Monte Irvin 20 and Willie Mays 24 and Don Mueller 22, then the battery, Sal Maglie 35 and Wes Westrum 9.

  Wes Westrum! How Papa Sol loved this stocky, dependable catcher. Seth recites his catechism to himself. Wesley Noreen Westrum. Born November 28, 1922, in Clearbrook, Minnesota. Solid as a rock behind the plate. Called one helluva game. Good glove: had .999 fielding percentage in 1950. No hit: had career BA of .217. Funniest quote Sol ever taught him came from Wes’s mouth and said volumes about the receiver’s artful command of the English language. When he was managing the woeful Mets in the midsixties and they pulled out a long, extra-inning game, he was later grilled by reporters. “So, Wes, what are your thoughts about the game?” one journalist asked. Wes scratched his head, reflected for a moment, and replied, “Well, it was a real cliff dweller.”

  The top of the eighth is a bane for Giants fans, a boon for Dodgers rooters. Papa Sol sits, stoic and seething. Seth spectates with a calm neutrality, knowing the Dodgers will soon score three times and lead 4–1, only to be ultimately caught and passed. But all around them is bedlam.

  Pee Wee singles, motors into third on the Dook’s single to right. The cobra, Sal the Barber, wild-pitches Robby, his personal mongoose, and Reese scores, with Snider reaching second safely. Now the roof falls in. Robinson is intentionally walked, Thomson butchers a drive by Pafko, then another one by Cox. It is 4–1 before you know it, and half of the Polo Grounds, filled with joy, is shrieking long and loud in a collective orgasm, while the other half, filled with despair, is cursing the day they were born.

  At inning’s end, a disconsolate Maglie traipses from mound to dugout, Sol gives him an empathetic look from afar, and Seth is recalling the bedtime story “The Saga of Sad-Sack Sal” that Papa Sol recounted to him once when he was five. About how poor Sal knocked around for a while in Mexico and finally made it to the bigs full time at the tender age of thirty-three. And about how he just shrugged it off, like a catcher’s bad sign, and proceeded to compile the greatest won-lost record for his first full three years—a jaw-dropping 59–18, for a percentage of .766—of any pitcher ever. By a whopping .95 points. Better than Cy Young and Christy Mathewson and Grover Cleveland Alexander and Walter Johnson and Bob Gibson and Nolan Ryan and anyone!

  “C’mon, you guys, I know you c’n do it!” Sol implores his Giants, who have just finished trudging off the field. He is still hopeful, but a solemn glare is all his eyes can muster.

  “Hey, bub, why don’t you just shadaaaaaaap, huh?” a sophisticated fan yells affectionately from above. To no avail: Sol is there but not there, so totally wrapped up in this, so inside himself, that he is oblivious to his friendly neighbor’s imprecations.

  A wet towel suffocates the hopes of Sol and about eighteen thousand other Giants fans: In their half of the eighth, pinch hitters Rigney and Thompson strike out and tap meekly back to the mound, respectively, and the usually pesky Stanky fans for the third out.

  As the dejected Jints take the field for the top of the ninth, Seth Stein ruminate
s. He is thinking about baseball as History. How this extraordinary game is not just a game, but—perhaps more than political machinations or global events or wars or changes in governments—a metaphor that represents, in some profound way, History itself. How its metaphorical criteria include the passing down of passions and information to future generations, the learning of life lessons, the learning from past experience, the learning from winning and losing, the overcoming of obstacles, the coping with ebb and with flow, the performing of actions under pressure and a microscope, the creation of a crucible in which ordinary events and people can be transformed, momentarily, into heroic entities.

  Baseball has always been and always will be, he is thinking, a sign of the times, a continuum. Thanks to its fans, players from the past—some long gone—live in the present and well into the future. Their personae, their statistics, their records, the numbers on their backs, even their most insignificant and stupefyingly idiotic idiosyncrasies live on compellingly, entering the brains and hearts of countless millions of passionate strangers, generation after generation, to be buried with their bones or burned with their ashes.

  Then there are the eternal routines and rituals that remain changeless, from 1869 to 1951 to 2033 and onward. The faithful maintenance of dizzying stats and the parochial lingo known to every true fan and the mindless infield chatter like no language known to humankind and the pregame fungo and the warm-up pitches and the practice catches in the outfield and the on-deck circles and the dugout ribbing and the dumb practical jokes and the rhubarbs and the ground rules and the spitting of tobacco juice and sunflower seeds and phlegm. Reminds Seth of the old Bill Veeck quote: “Baseball is the only thing besides the paper clip that hasn’t changed.”

  And this pennant race of 1951, and this final, climactic playoff game that Seth feels privileged to be witnessing, what more glowing example could a person find of metaphor, of History?